He lit a cigarette and drew deeply on it. Then he asked: “What made you do it?”
“Annette Meakin,” she said.
“What else?”
“Freedom,” she said. “That old cliché.”
“Don’t be half-smart,” he said.
“That speech he made at Taishet.” She was counter-attacking. “That must have been a good story for you?”
Sweet Jesus! Harry Bridges thought. If only we could love and marry the girl next door and be honest all our lives. “It was a good story,” he agreed.
“And you sent it to your newspaper?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“Why? Surely the attack on the Jews was a good story.”
“We were warned off.”
“We?”
“All the journalists on the train.”
“But they’re all communists. It was a scoop for you, wasn’t it, Harry?”
“I suppose so,” he said. He listened to his own hypocrisy. “But I couldn’t have filed it from there. It would never have got through.”
“So you’ll file it when you get to the end of the line?”
“The end of the line,” he said. “Don’t make me laugh.”
“But you will?” There was, he decided, a ferret brain inside that beautiful head.
He said: “No.”
“Why?”
“Like I said, you should have been a journalist.”
“Why, Harry?”
“Because,” he said.
She took the glass, drinking and coughing a little because there wasn’t any water with the whisky.
He appraised the room with its red plush and sticky varnish. He had made similar appraisals many times before. The shoddy Moscow flat compared with the lush Manhattan apartment. Did it matter if it gave comfort not qualified by knowledge of greater luxuries? The birthday present for your kid. A length of pipe with a wooden handle, did it matter if it compared unfavourably with a replica of an American self-loading Armalite AR 10 rifle? Did it hell, Harry Bridges thought, if it gave pleasure to your son. Happiness had nothing to do with refinements of civilisation.
“You’re very stubborn,” she said.
“We’re a good pair.”
“Let’s go down to the restaurant,” she said.
“Will you come back to Russia?” he asked as they dressed.
“How can I? They’ll know I smuggled the book.”
“Don’t tell anyone. Just hand it over and say you don’t want any publicity. Then fly back to Moscow.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I would have to be sure there was something to come back to. I would have to be sure I was coming back to someone I admired.”
* * *
In the hotel bedroom he had made his headquarters Colonel Yury Razin considered the information brought to him by the crone. So Bridges and the English girl were sleeping together. He called for their dossiers and added the information, making a cross-reference to it. “Anything on their microphone?” he asked one of the two K.G.B. officers who were also under scrutiny. The Mongolian-faced assistant shook his head.
“It wasn’t connected,” he said. “You told us to concentrate on Pavlov.”
“Connect it,” Razin said.
He took the list of passengers from a cardboard file and put a red cross against the name of Libby Chandler. The fact that she and Bridges were lovers wasn’t in itself important. But Razin was always pleased to receive such information. It was all part of his survival kit.
* * *
“Like you,” Harry Bridges said, “I have a secret.” He poured more champagne.
“You have a wife and eight children?”
“No wives,” Bridges told Libby. “I nearly got married once but her father shot himself.” He decided he was a little drunk.
They were in the hotel restaurant. The tables had been cleared and the place was packed with boisterous Siberians.
“I am,” Bridges told her solemnly, “on to a big story. Perhaps the biggest story of my life.”
“Can you beat my manuscript? It could be another Zhivago.”
Bridges nodded. “I can. An assassination maybe – the cause of many wars.”
Libby put down her glass. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I don’t know anything about any assassinations.”
In the middle of the room two jack-booted soldiers were doing a Cossack dance, squatting and kicking their legs out. Their colleagues clapped their hands and sang.
Bridges decided that Libby didn’t know anything about an assassination; although he suspected that she knew something. Why had she suddenly decided to tell him about the micro-film?
“There’s some sort of plot,” he told her. “I don’t know much about it. Except that it must concern Yermakov. I reckon it’s timed for the next leg of the journey. Somewhere between here and Khabarovsk.” He watched her closely, trying to determine if her surprise was genuine.
“What sort of a plot?” she asked, eyes wide over the rim of the champagne glass.
“I don’t know. Perhaps they are going to assassinate him.”
“After that speech at Taishet – the one you didn’t file – it can only benefit Mankind.”
“It won’t make any difference to Mankind. Someone else will take his place. Maybe someone a damned sight worse. In any case Yermakov has done a lot for the Soviet Union.”
“Like Hitler did a lot for Germany?”
Bridges shook his head. “Look around. They’re not doing too badly.” One of the Cossack dancers fell on his back and was helped back to his table. “Look around Siberia – that’s not doing badly either. Then,” he said, “take a walk round Times Square at midnight. Or travel on the London underground at night.”
“That’s no argument,” she said. “And you know it.…”
“I feel,” he said, pouring more champagne, “that you’re about to talk about freedom and democracy. They didn’t do much for my old man.”
“Your trauma,” she said. “The monkey on your back. Your excuse for everything.” They were silent for a while, then she said: “Do you know anything more about this … this plot?”
“Only that Viktor Pavlov’s behind it.” He thought he noticed something more than surprise in her expression.
“Anyway,” she said brightly, “you’ll have your scoop. I suppose you’ll have to come to Japan to file it.”
“I don’t have a ticket or an exit visa.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“Nothing,” Bridges told her. “I told you I was on to a big story. I didn’t say I was going to write it.”
There was contempt on her face. It gave him some sort of perverse pleasure, “Your father,” she said, “would have been very proud of you.”
Bridges stood up unsteadily. “Maybe I should warn the authorities. If I withhold information I am, after all, an accessory.”
“Where are you going?”
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I want to have a few words with an old contact.”
He threaded his way through the tables and sat down beside Colonel Yury Razin.
* * *
As Viktor Pavlov hasn’t found me, Libby Chandler thought, then I must find him, to warn him.
She found him in the hotel lobby talking to the receptionist. She thought he looked like Tal, the chess player, briefly world-champion. But, whereas Tal reserved his expression of deep intensity for chess, Pavlov wore it all the time.
He turned and said in a low voice: “I’m going for a walk. Perhaps you would like to accompany me? I’ll meet you in ten minutes, outside the Museum of Regional History.”
She went upstairs and dressed for the cold.
Pavlov was waiting outside the museum. Powdered snow was falling lightly. “Take my arm,” he told her. “Make it look as if we’re lovers.”
She took his arm and they walked down a side street. “We can talk now,” he sa
id. “You were going to tell me why you wouldn’t betray me.…”
Libby said: “I’ve come to warn you. Harry Bridges knows.”
He didn’t falter in his stride. “Really? Did you tell him?”
His attitude angered her. “If that’s what you think we might as well go back to the hotel.”
He put his hand on hers, protectively, like a lover. She thought: Perhaps he’s going to kill me.
He said nothing, his silence forcing her to speak. “No I didn’t tell him. Someone else must have.”
“Difficult to believe, Miss Chandler. You two are very close.”
“Would I come out to warn you if I’d told him?”
They turned a corner and walked on to a wooden sidewalk. The powdered snow sparkled in the beams of light from the windows of the timber houses.
Pavlov was still considering her last remark. After a while he said no, he didn’t think she would have come out. “Unless you have a conscience and you didn’t want me to think you’d betrayed me.”
“I’m not as devious as that.”
“No, perhaps not,” he said, neither believing nor disbelieving.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“What I should do,” he said, “is kill you and Harry Bridges.”
“That wouldn’t do any good. If Harry’s going to betray you he’ll have done it by now. I last saw him with Razin, the K.G.B. man.”
“Really. And how did you know our friend Colonel Razin was in the K.G.B.?”
“Because he questioned me in Novosibirsk.”
“I see.” They came to the Church of the Saviour. Libby stopped Pavlov at the entrance. They peered in and saw some old women, like bundles of clothes, kneeling on the floor. “Several of the Decembrists were buried here,” Pavlov told her. “Princess Trubetskaya among them.”
“Revolutionaries like you?”
“If you like. It’s rather melodramatic though.”
They walked on, his silence forcing her to ask: “What are you going to do about Harry Bridges?”
“There’s nothing much I can do. It’s up to Bridges. If he talks then the game’s up – you’re walking beside a dead man. But there’s a chance he won’t. In the first place he can’t know much. In the second he won’t want the Russians to know that he has any information. That would jeopardise his position in the Soviet Union. They would always suspect that he was biding his time to send it to his newspaper.”
“Is he that much of a coward?” Her voice was sad.
“He’s diplomatic,” Pavlov answered.
They turned another corner. The lights of a main thoroughfare were ahead of them. Libby guessed that the walk was almost over. “So you trust me?”
“I don’t know. You haven’t explained why you didn’t tell Razin.”
“I heard Yermakov’s speech at Taishet. Isn’t that enough?”
“I suppose so.” He took his hand away from hers. “I suppose I must trust you. If I didn’t I would have killed you back there.” He pointed behind them.
“You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”
He nodded, shaking snow from his fur hat. “Please don’t say it doesn’t make any difference.”
“I wasn’t going to.…”
“Another girl very much like you once did.” He stopped suddenly and drew her into the shadows. “Good God!” Libby followed his gaze into the wide street ahead. Flanked by a dozen militia and men in dark overcoats, Vasily Yermakov was taking a walk in the streets of Irkutsk.
* * *
Anna had explained that she flew from Khabarovsk to Irkutsk because she couldn’t keep the news from him any longer. She was having a baby and this would re-unite them. She was sorry about the terrible row: it had been both their faults, she with her clumsy words, he with his perversity.
She didn’t seem to doubt that they were together again, that anything could mar their love in this land of hers. She didn’t mention his Jewishness – like a faithful wife not referring to the crime when her husband returns from prison, Pavlov thought.
Ruthlessness, he decided, lying on the bed beside her, with his son or daughter in her belly, was more difficult than he had imagined. She told him that the ceremony with Yermakov was still going to take place in Khabarovsk; but, because of the baby, the authorities had allowed her to come to Irkutsk. Then she drew his head to her swelling breasts and fell asleep while he lay awake. Finally he too fell asleep, the dagger of guilt knifing his dreams. But even in those dreams he never wavered from his resolve.
Next morning – before he went to see the Priest – they drove along the forty-mile asphalt road to Lake Baikal. They arrived at dawn with a wild sunrise reflected on the waters of the world’s deepest lake; great obelisks and islands of red and orange on the calm waters that could be swept within seconds by massive waves that tossed the transparent fish on to the shore where they melted.
They went to the village of Listvyanka and stood hand in hand, remembering their honeymoon, awed by the lake.
“The history of Russia,” Pavlov said, pointing at the water.
“The history of Siberia,” Anna said.
When the Russians were fighting the Japanese in 1904 they tried to put a train across the ice, forgetting the warm springs underneath. The engine sank and was presumably still down there, crewed by the little pop-eyed, transparent dracunculus. At the beginning of the war troops were transported on the magnificent, elephantine ice-breaker “Baikal” built by the British; but it was always getting ice-bound; so the contractors worked desperately to complete the last link of the Great Siberian Railway – the loop round the toe of the lake. They blasted thirty-three tunnels through mountains plunging directly into the water; so hurriedly did they work, after the Japanese attack on Port Arthur, that the first train was derailed ten times. In the civil war that followed the October Revolution whole families of refugees fleeing across Baikal were frozen to death on the ice or swallowed in fissures that opened up with a cannon-roar.
Now the dawn silence enveloped Viktor Pavlov and his wife. They wandered down the lanes of Listvyanka among the wooden huts built by pioneer settlers, past a snow-covered sign bearing the warning Beware of Bears.
Anna had done a lot of research into Baikal and she took him to the Limnological Institute, talking as if they’d never parted, and showed the relief map of Baikal. She told him that geologists thought Baikal was recently formed, part of the Great Rift that plunges down to East Africa. There was a theory, she said, that the lake wasn’t always land-bound, which would explain the presence of its seals. Now the problem was pollution.
They tried to find the guest house where they had stayed on their honeymoon but it had gone out of business. Tourists no longer stayed in Listvyanka; they came from Irkutsk on the new 1,250 h.p. hydrofoils and returned the same day. But the building was still there, deserted; they kissed outside it, lips warm on their cold faces. Pavlov looked for a fishing sail on the water, but there was none to be seen.
With despair cold inside him, resolve unchanged, he drove back to Irkutsk in the red Moscavitch they had hired. He tried to think of a way to spare Anna, but his brain had no answer. How could he tell her to go to Kharbarovsk by herself? What suspicions would it arouse in Razin’s mind?
He dropped her at the Siberian Branch of the Institute of Curative Cosmetics of the Ministry of Public Health. “In other words,” she grinned at him, “a beauty parlour.” For twelve roubles you could have a massage, for twenty a paraffin mask, for eighty you could have freckles removed.
Pavlov went to see the Priest.
* * *
It was Yermakov’s own idea to walk around Irkutsk. Razin was against it because the streets were dark and there were wild men abroad, descendants of revolutionaries, White Russians, murderers and bandits.
But Yermakov was adamant. After his speech he sat in his state room in the centre of the city exhausted. He had attacked the Chinese because the next leg of the journey took them alongside the Amur River and 1
,892 miles of Chinese border. The speech depressed him because it was retrograde: for more than a century the Chinese and Russians had been contesting these border territories. The Black Crime of Blagoveshchensk – Cossack troops had been shot at from the Manchurian bank of the Amur and, in retaliation, they had taken thousands of innocent Chinese from their homes in Blagoveshchensk and drowned them in the river at bayonet point. That was seventy-three years ago and still they shot at each other across the Amur.
Yermakov gazed out of the window at the dusk settling on the city, the sun sliding away behind snow-clouds. It gave a snugness to lighted rooms which he would never enjoy. What have I achieved? In whatever direction he looked there were camps filled with men whose only crime was disagreement. Was it so different from the days when convicts with split tongues worked the Tsars’ gold and silver mines, branded, beheaded or hung on hooks if they rebelled? When you could be exiled for begging, fighting, taking snuff, beating your wife, cutting down trees or being idle.
Journeying across Siberia, Yermakov had been contemlating an amnesty for certain prisoners, a gesture to assauge his conscience. Paying off the creditors of the soul.
He watched some children playing on the sidewalk. He stared across the rooftops into snug rooms. He observed the outlines of apartment blocks. He remembered the crowd in the square, well-dressed and healthy. He thought of the Siberian oil wells of Samotlor which would produce 100 million tons of oil this year, while the fuel-crisis in the west worsened, the Komsomols building glacial cities in the tundra. He remembered his guns, his rockets, his atomic bombs. And, as the snow began to fall, he smiled. We are still on the ascent, he thought: America is on the decline. The prisoners in the camps are the casualties of victory. I have helped to lead Russia to these achievements. The melancholy was replaced by fierce happiness. It was then that he decided to walk among his people, to re-affirm the sort of popularity that no young careerist motivated by selfish ambitions could ever inspire.
As they walked Yermakov asked Razin: “Could Nixon walk alone in the streets of Washington without fear?”
Razin shook his head, watching the rooftops, the windows without lights, the dark side streets.
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